What Type of Label Do You Want for Your Child?

This article at The Week, How labels like 'black' and 'working class' shape your identity, is especially interesting to me as I am now fully invested in balancing the full-on parenting and teaching moments of kids with brains actively perceiving, creating, and begging for labels of all the new concepts and things in their worlds.  The acquisition of new words, that was a trickle in toddler years and impressed relatives at holidays just after entering preschool becomes, in the early elementary years, an exponential flood.  This is especially true for kids born to parents who use a large vocabulary around and with the baby (mentioned in this post).  The Week article exists at the intersection we can see in these two realities: Kids are busying acquiring words about the world around them, and, Kids are involved in explaining what they are doing and why (more on that below) and beginning to understand themselves, their sense of self and identity.

Words everywhere to explain and label the world.  Being developmentally centered on your ideas, your experiences, and your actions.  The explaining of what they did or why they did something is often taking place during discipline  "Why did you take that away from him?" "Why didn't you put the plate in the sink?" "Why did you do that?" - We are demanding a verbal accounting of personality, thoughts, and narratives from children awash in words.  We have heard them parrot back what we have lectured.  We have heard them give a possibly age-appropriate response.  And we have seen misapplication (or misappropriation) of newly acquired concepts when the child is flexing his or her lines of word associations to offer an actual reflective answer.  The words offered up can (and do, according to the article) become the words the kids use to explain themselves; to define themselves; to know themselves.  In a decade or so they might have high school teachers or university instructors introducing the psychological construct of the moment you were present for - when the student began to believe certain words were about him or her, that certain words were him or her.  The labels became the reality.  The Week article is primarily discussing the accuracy of the labels, where they come from, and what damage can be done.  A discussion on undoing those labels inside yourself is an entirely different discussion.  One best had with Alan Watts with his talks on not eating the menu for the food.